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AMD A10-6800K & A10-6700 Richland APU Review

AMD A10-6800K & A10-6700 Richland APU Testing:

Testing this latest A85X board from Gigabyte will involve running the GA-F2A85X-UP4 through OCC's test suite of benchmarks, which includes both synthetic benchmarks and real-world applications, to see how each of these products perform. The gaming tests will also consist of both synthetic benchmarks and actual game-play, in which we can see if similarly prepared setups offer any performance advantages. The system will receive a fully updated, fresh install of Windows 7 Professional 64-bit edition, in addition to the latest drivers for each board and the latest AMD Catalyst drivers. To ensure as few variables as possible, all hardware will be tested at their stock speeds, timings, voltages, and latencies – unless otherwise stated. Turbo Boost is disabled to make a fair comparison without skewing results.

AMD and Gigabyte have an array of tools through the utility lineup and features in 3D Dual BIOS that will remove all the sport of overclocking if you want them to. Utilizing the best methods of overclocking each processor, I went with raising the multiplier on the 6800K while using bus speed adjustments on the 6700 due to its locked multiplier. Each method has its pros and cons yet gives us the best possible speeds with each of these AMD APUs. Using the BIOS I raised the multiplier/bclock until stress failure and incrementally raised the voltage to achieve the maximum frequency that would pass stress testing with Prime 95 testing. AMD states that the voltage applied to the CPU for overclocking also works for GPU frequency. In doing this I was able to achieve the overclocking results below for both the CPU and GPU frequencies.

Two side notes on this: 1) I was not able to spend the time I would have liked on the overclocking of these new A-Series APUs so given more time to experiment there may be a bit more to be achieved in the overclocking of these models, and 2) It is possible that CPUID may need an update to properly read some information regarding the new A-Series as I noticed that the voltage readout was showing 1.50V when it was set lower, something I found to be the case with the Trinity review. The results I achieved with the A10-6800K and A10-6700 for both the CPU and GPU are listed below.

Maximum Overclock

Each CPU and motherboard has been tested for stability at the clock speeds listed when in an over-clocked state. These clock speeds will be used to run the test suite and will show the performance increase over the stock settings in the overclocked scoring.